IVO da PARIGI. – Capuchin thinker and polemicist, b. in Paris ca. 1590, d. there in 1678. A lawyer at the Parisian bar, he entered the Order at the age of thirty; ordained a priest in 1632, and several times provincial definitor, he spent his life writing works.
In Les heureux successes de la piété (Paris 1632; 3rd ed., there 1643) he defended the monastic life against the attacks of Bishop J.-P. Camus (v.) and his colleagues; Louis XIII prevented its condemnation by the Sorbonne and the episcopate. He addressed the conversion of libertines in the Théologie naturelle (there 1633; 4th ed., there 1645) and L'Agent de Dieu dans le monde (there 1656, 1658, 1661), employing a scientific apologetic based on the culture of sixteenth-century thinkers, which the new philosophy of Carlesius soon caused to be forgotten; moreover, he relied on the feeling or intuitive knowledge of the spirit, foreshadowing Pascal, Fénelon, and Chateaubriand. In the ascetic work Les morales chrétiennes (3 vols., there 1638–41; 4th ed., there 1645–48; German trans. Prague 1715 and 1720) he leads man, through the observance of his moral and social duties and with the help of Grace, to mysticism, which he describes in Les progrès de l'amour divin (4 vols., Paris 1643; Latin trans.: Philosophia sacra, Salzburg 1678) and in Conduite du religieux (Rennes 1653, Paris 1654). In the treatise De l'indifférence (there 1638, 1640, and 1646 [?]), beginning with the indifference of libertines, he refutes that of the pseudo-mystics and describes the authentic indifference of contemplative souls. In Digestum sapientiae (there 1648; 2nd ed., 3 vols., there 1659–61; vol. IV, Lyon 1672) and in Jus naturale rebus creatis a Deo constitutum (Paris 1658) he sets forth his philosophy of Platonic tendency, inspired by Raymond Lull and especially by Marsilio Ficino; in it he offers a complete vision of the universe, which exerted a certain influence even on Leibniz himself.
He fought Jansenism in Des misericordes de Dieu (Paris 1645, Liège 1647, Leuven 1675) against A. Arnaud’s La fréquente Communion, whose doctrinal foundations he refuted in the Très humbles remonstrances présentées à la reine (Paris 1654). He deals with freedom against Jansenist moral necessity in De la nécessité (there 1653). He took an interest in education, art, and politics in Le gentil-
homme chrétien (there 1666) and in the posthumous Le magistrat chrétien (there 1688). He published various other works; recent scholars of the French seventeenth century have to some extent reassessed this distinguished representative of devout humanism.